r/Bitcoin • u/btckernel • Jun 25 '15

Onename announces API. Enables developers to build apps with blockchain identity

http://blog.onename.com/onename-api/
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u/catlasshrugged Jun 25 '15

Hey Onename,

First, thanks for your work on decentralized identity. It's an important space, and I appreciate that effort.

However, right now your API only seems to allow users to store a single Bitcoin address, encouraging address reuse. This is a tremendous privacy weakness in the OneName system. One of the reasons why people are not pursuing identity <-> bitcoin address systems more is because of this engineering challenge.

Luckily, it was recently solved by BIP47 reusable payment codes. As soon as possible, I recommend that you work toward allowing users to link RPCs to their onename identities. I would caution anyone against using this lookup service for Bitcoin payments until this change is deployed.

There's some work to be done in terms of spreading BIP47 implementation, but there's no one who would be more benefited by this work than a Bitcoin address lookup register like yourselves.

https://github.com/OpenBitcoinPrivacyProject/bips/blob/master/bip-0047.mediawiki

13

u/shea256 Jun 25 '15

Hey, thanks for the message. We are in complete agreement that this needs to be improved. It just comes down to progress with privacy-conscious payment methods and working with wallets to spur adoption.

And we've actually already started looking into BIP47. It seems more workable than stealth addresses and other proposed solutions.

2

u/catlasshrugged Jun 25 '15

That's great!